Martha WainwrightCome Home to Mama(Maple Music)
Sometimes an album is so blunt and uncompromising in its personal content that you feel a bit like a voyeur just for hearing it.
This can result in the uncomfortable listener filing it away for good, hoping the artist will take his or her problems to a therapist next time. But a gifted singer-songwriter will find the universal and the humorous in the bleakest moments, making the entire experience a healing one for both performer and audience.
With her fourth album (only her third containing original material), Martha Wainwright makes the most effective use of her gifts: the lyrically confessional and brutally frank Come Home to Mama is a deeply moving album that transcends one person’s upheaval.
Two almost simultaneous life-changing events — the birth of her son, Arcangelo, and the death of her mother, Kate McGarrigle — provide the emotional backdrop here. The eerily beautiful “Proserpina,” McGarrigle’s last composition, is the disc’s centrepiece, while the languid “All Your Clothes” and the bass-driven, club-ish “I Wanna Make an Arrest” (on which Wainwright wails like Yoko Ono) also confront loss.
How much of it is fodder for gossip? What are we to make of lines like “My marriage is failing, but I keep trying all the time,” in “All Your Clothes,” or “My husband’s been lyin’ and cheatin’ / I turned my cheek and reason / I change my tune every day,” from the quite beautiful “Everything Wrong,” in which the singer confesses her fears to her child, all the while trying to play the protector?
And what about “I really like the makeup sex / It’s the only kind I ever get,” from the catchy, emotionally ambivalent “Can You Believe It?” That self-deprecating, darkly funny line says more about tension in a relationship than most writers can get into an entire song.
Wainwright has said she likes to put a twist in her autobiographical material, so the literal truth of such lyrics probably shouldn’t be the focus. And when the words have the kind of wit and resonance these do, the best strategy is to look for yourself in them.
Musically, the move toward a more electro-pop sound, with keyboards dominating the arrangements instead of guitars, is an inspired one. Producer Yuka Honda has made many wise choices in these 10 tracks. Among the more arresting touches are the way she frames the opener “I Am Sorry” with a bronto backbeat and encourages Wainwright to find her inner Kate Bush in the vocal approach, the layering of keys over a simple chord progression in the gloomy “Leave Behind” and the cartoonish tension that ignites the macabre “Four Black Sheep.”
With Come Home to Mama, Wainwright has turned the confessional album, too often something to be dreaded, into a place where we can find a bit of comfort and catharsis.Rating: 4 out of 5–Bernard Perusse, Postmedia News

Godspeed You! Black Emperor‘Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!(Constellation Records)
It’s natural for a band’s legend to grow during a period of inactivity. In the case of Montreal’s Godspeed You! Black Emperor, there was a heavy fog of mystique to begin with: an instrumental collective not given to speaking on stage or in the media; lengthy pieces thick with apocalyptic drones and hair-raising drama; grainy artwork that emphasized the music’s end-of-days, start-of-revolution spirit. Add a seven-year-hiatus, and Godspeed had become downright mythic by the time the group was reactivated in 2010.The shows that followed brought the band back into sharp focus, and they were anything but nostalgic. Interpretations of Godspeed’s early work focused on a pervasive pre-millennial anxiety, but the feverish 2011 performances in the band’s hometown of Montreal were absolutely contemporary. While it helped that the band resurfaced at a time fraught with even more fear and loathing than the turn of the century, what mattered most was the enduring power and fascinating ciphers embedded in its monolithic epics. Godspeed’s first album in a decade benefits from the timelessness of the band’s music and of its tent-pole emotions, dread and hope. The two central 20-minute compositions on ‘Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! date back to the collective’s original era, but whether or not the listener recalls hearing them performed in concert before the hiatus, they’re the fresh product of a revitalized group. That’s especially true of “Mladic” (previously known in its live incarnation as “Albanian”), perhaps the most seamless of Godspeed’s works. There isn’t a straight line that links the opening drones and distant violin to the valedictory triumph of the climax, but the internal movements segmenting some of the band’s songs are replaced by a restless force powering the piece ever forward. As always, patience is rewarded: When a terrifying phalanx of guitars splits open to reveal the runaway central theme near the halfway mark, there’s a catharsis that wouldn’t have been earned without the early ominous escalation. (Those guitars are more abrasive than anything on Godspeed’s previous albums, reflecting the current eight-member lineup’s grittier live sound.) A field-recording coda of clattering pots and pans brings the casserole demonstrations to a global audience, reinforces the older composition’s link to the present, and ends a sometimes alarming piece on a note of resilience. “We Drift Like Worried Fire” (original title: “Gamelan”) doesn’t share “Mladic’s” relentless momentum, but it does share the natural progression. Looking back, one may not be sure how the full-throttle conclusion was reached from the introductory plucked strings and seasick guitar, but there’s an addictive dream-state logic at work here. There’s also a rare romantic allure in a stirring violin theme, before a percussive interlude once again exposes the raw tension that’s never far from the surface. A pair of shorter, more atmospheric tracks act as relief valves and sound like previews of another album (an even darker one, in the case of the fearful white noise coursing through “Strung Like Lights at Thee Printemps Erable”). Hopefully another album will indeed emerge: There’s an air of unfinished business to ‘Allelujah! — nailing down a pair of essential pieces that were drifting through live bootlegs — but its ecstasy and righteous rage suggest Godspeed’s work isn’t done.Rating: 4 out of 5— Jordan Zivitz, Postmedia News

LadyhawkNo Can Do(Triple Crown)
“There’s no hope, this is a Terminal City/But don’t they make it pretty?/Don’t they make it nice?” sings Ladyhawk’s Duffy Driediger on “Bedbugs,” a not-so-subtle jab at Vancouver’s penchant for sweeping its problems under the covers and out of sight in order to keep up appearances. The Kelowna, B.C,-bred band’s latest is like that: Big rock hooks and catchy harmonies (think Sloan meets Toronto stoner rockers Quest For Fire) that, on the surface, are instantly understood. Underneath however, lies a dishevelled bar stool weariness, a half-drunk, half-stoned bitterness that speaks of inner doubts and a biting commentary about the world outside and within (“I’m A Witch,” “Sinking Ship”). No Can Do is an “all-killer, no-filler” kind of album that will get your head bobbing, with New Pornographers/Nada Surf pop hooks that will remain stuck in your head for hours (“No Can Do,” “You Read My Mind”). A very fine vintage of B.C.-bred rock.Rating: 4 out of 5— Francois Marchand, Postmedia News